A strange silence fell over the British Labor Party immediately after its electoral defeat. Even the flurry of mutual recrimination within the party leadership hardly lasted more than a few days. The annual party conference held in October of last …
“Couch Liberalism” Editors: To list all my disagreements with Harold Rosenberg’s raid on what he chooses to call “Couch Liberalism” would require more space than you can allot me and more time than I can spare at the moment. Suffice …
On the morning of his scheduled hearing before the Security and Subversive Control Board of the government department in which he worked, Henry J. awoke with a start. His mouth felt dry. He picked up the letter from the Chief …
The last three months of 1955 were marked by one dominant event: the collapse of the “Geneva spirit,” at least until expediency requires its resurrection, and a return to the cold war with the position of the West considerably weakened. …
I would not think it necessary to impose upon the patience of the readers of DISSENT by a counter-rebuttal of Herbert Marcuse’s reply to me, were it only in order to answer his argument, or his added interpretation of The …
For a while it seemed as if there were no more challenging problem in our domestic life than McCarthyism. To be sure, the man and the ism were shorthand for a cluster of unpleasant—not to say symptomatic—developments. How did the …
Political myths bury their undertakers. At the turn of this century, archaic modes of political thought had supposedly been laid to rest forever. The men of the Progressive movement thought of themselves as children of the Enlightenment, armed with instrumentalism …
I Murray Kempton’s book (PART OF OUR TIME, by Murray Kempton. Simon & Schuster. 334 pp. $4.) of portraits from the radical thirties has been reviewed with praise by such writers as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr and Daniel Bell. …
“The guaranteed annual wage is not a stepping stone to full security, but a milepost in a social struggle that never ends because the ramifications of America’s economy are such that with each new round of the class struggle something is almost always gained but nothing is ever solved.”
One of the most singular advantages we derive from machinery is in the check which it affords against the inattention, idleness, or the knavery of human agents. CHARLES BABBAGE, The Economy of Machinery, 1832. The unequivocal statement can be made …
I What is remarkable about the manufacture of myths in the twentieth century is that it takes place under the noses of living witnesses of the actual events and, in fact, cannot dispense with their collaboration. Everyone is familiar with …
I When one glances through the writings of our modern, hard-headed, non-utopian sociologists—students of industrial organization, of “labor relations,” of the corporation and its managerial structure—one notices a strain of controlled optimism in their otherwise businesslike and down-to-earth findings. Much …
During the past few months ex-Senator Harry Cain has defended the Fifth Amendment; a Senate Committee has expressed doubts about the workings of the Attorney General’s “Subversive List”; the State Department, in an orgy of issuing passports as an aftermath …
For a quarterly to indulge in a retrospect after two years of existence might seem a little premature. But those who know the difficulties of publishing a magazine like DISSENT may forgive us the indulgence. Besides, there may be some …
Sometimes cant harms no one but those who speak it; sometimes, as the wretched mishandling of the polio problem by the Eisenhower administration shows, it can endanger thousands of people. No one who remembers the hopes of April 12 when …
